Walter Mosley Gives New Meaning to the Term "Noir Fiction"

Writing about
Walter Mosley is very frustrating. The problem is that you can’t give your
reader a sense for how good he is in just a few sentences. You keep wanting to
insert about five pages or so or ten or 20 and say, “Here, read this!
Isn’t this great stuff?” Okay, one
sentence, from When the Thrill Is Gone,
from Mosley’s new series featuring New York private investigator Leonid McGill. (Leonid’s father,
Tolstoy McGill, considered himself a revolutionary, and named his son after
Leonid Brezhnev. Mosley loves attention-getting names.)

So here's the sentence: "Though
they had taken different paths to their damnations, both men had one
overarching philosophy in common: they saw all men’s deeds as acts of fate and
therefore were never plagued by guilt or remorse."

Leonid’s best friend is dying of cancer, his
wife is having an affair with a teenager, and he talks like this? Saying that
this is detective fiction is like saying that Michael Jordan was a basketball
player. Actually, though, the word is out on Mosley; Time magazine described him as “a writer whose work transcends
category and qualifies as serious literature.”

Mosley will be
60 next year, and although he shows no signs of slowing down (thank goodness!),
he can look back on a lifetime of achievement. Born in Watts, he used the area
as the setting for the Easy Rawlins books, which were set in the '30s and '40s. The last of these, Devil in a
Blue Dress, was made into a terrific, wonderfully atmospheric movie
starring Denzel Washington. Denzel has never looked better.

Whatever serious
literature is in America, it has often grown out of popular literature, and
this is certainly the case with When the
Thrill is Gone. (Mosley often uses musical references in his titles.) It
begins the way so many great detective stories begin; the affinities with the
movie Chinatown are especially
striking. The detective is sitting in his office, minding his own business, and
an attractive woman comes in. She tells a tale of woe, and hires him. She’s lying, of course (she’s not who she says she is), but before
the detective knows it, he’s gotten too involved to back out.

Now that Robert
B. Parker is dead, Mosley is the heir apparent to great tradition of Raymond Chandler. Leonid
McGill could say, with Philip Marlowe, “I was part of the nastiness now.”
Actually, McGill has always been part of the nastiness. He is, by his own
admission, a bad man who is (mostly) reformed now. His awareness of his own
guilt for past misdeeds, his awareness of his affinities with the assortment of bad guys that he
meets, give When the Thrill Is Gone a
punch, a visceral quality. When a detective novel lingers in the mind as this
book does, you know that you’re in the hands of a master.